Tack­ling real and re­place­ment limbs

Now I fo­cus my at­ten­tion on the char­ac­ter’s re­main­ing nat­u­ral arm. One key as­pect of the de­tail­ing is adding arm hair, be­cause it makes the char­ac­ter more real and less aes­thetic, which fits into the gritty cy­ber­punk world he’s meant to be a part of. Even now I’m us­ing the same brush for all my work and sim­ply vary­ing the size of it. Af­ter that, it’s fi­nally time to flesh out the ro­botic arm. I wanted to avoid some­thing that looked too clunky or sci-fi, in­stead opt­ing for a more bare-bones, min­i­mal­ist de­sign for a func­tional but worn-down me­chan­i­cal arm. Part of the job here is to cre­ate the right metal tex­ture com­bined with the worn, dam­aged look that fits the bat­tle-like mood of the il­lus­tra­tion. To ac­com­plish the metal­lic look, I need to de­velop a high level of con­trast, so that the high­lighted area is very bright and re­flects light from the sur­round­ing en­vi­ron­ment.